Burns Singer
Burns Singer (29 August 1928 – 8 September 1964) was a Scottish poet and translator who was born in New York City as James Hyman Singer. He grew up in Scotland from age four and was educated in Glasgow. He adopted his mother's maiden name, Burns, and showed an early love of writing. Singer was especially drawn to Polish poetry and translated works by poets such as Ignacy Krasicki, Juliusz Słowacki, Cyprian Norwid, and Jerzy Peterkiewicz. Some of these translations appeared in Five Centuries of Polish Poetry, 1450–1950 (1962).
He studied English composition and zoology at the University of Glasgow. In 1945, during a break from university, he went to Cornwall and met the poet W. S. Graham, a major influence. He then spent several years traveling around Europe. After his mother’s suicide in 1951, he returned to Scotland and worked for four years at a marine biology lab in Aberdeen to help his father. He had also spent a year in Marburg and served in the United States Army.
In 1955 he married Marie Battle, an African-American psychologist, and they moved to London, where he did freelance writing and found success as a critic and poet. His collection Still and All (1957) was published during his lifetime and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 1960 he published Five Centuries of Polish Poetry, a selections of translations, with Jerzy Peterkiewicz. Critics described his style as a middle path between the New Apocalypse and The Movement, and between the Scottish Renaissance and the Sassenach.
He spent time with Marie in Cambridge before returning to marine biology. Singer died of a heart attack in Plymouth in 1964, and his ashes were scattered at sea. A memorial to him stands in the churchyard of St Mary the Less (Little St Mary’s) in Cambridge.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 05:29 (CET).